The Documentation Standards Working Group proposes to work with museums and museum collection management system software creators (vendors) to devise and implement a mechanism, grounded in existing data standards, that facilitates ‘at the touch of a button’ the exchange of object and object requirement data, needed when objects are lent from one institution to another. Our current experience is that when objects are lent, data about them and their protection is currently shared in text documents, by email, by phone, by any method other than the one that requires least effort and seems most obvious: direct from one collections management system to another. Our intention is tio jeep the dataset to be exchanged as small as possible: sufficient to adequately (as opposed to perfectly) describe objects and the requirements usually stipulated in the process of their being lent from one institution to another. This data set will be mapped to the CIDOC-CRM. Object description data will be limited to that required to meet the Object ID standard.

Jonathan Whitson Cloud spent the early years of his career with the BBC’s post production department, editing television programmes and films. During this time post production was making a speedy transition from razor blades and cellotape® to digital technology and as a result of this Jonathan developed an interest in what computing could do for knowledge organisation and knowledge management, even if he wouldn’t have recognised those terms at the time. His museum career began with Brighton & Hove Museum Service where he participated in the documentation of the collections. Aside from a two year stint as an assistant curator of decorative arts Jonathan has remained in documentation ever since; at the National Portrait Gallery, Tate, the British Museum and since 2016 at the Horniman Museum and Gardens as Documentation Manager. Being essentially lazy his obsession remains the re-use of recorded knowledge and therefor recording it so that it can be re-used.

Maija Ekosaari Tampere University of Technology, Finland
Short Bio:

Maija Ekosaari is a specialist in cultural heritage information management. She has worked for the Finnish National Gallery and the National Board of Antiquities in Helsinki, as well as Museum Centre Vapriikki and Tampere Art Museum in Tampere, Finland. She has studied in Finland and in the United States and holds an Associate Degree in Business Administration, Bachelor of Fine Arts in Design, and MA in Art History. At present, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Tampere University of Technology researching the documentation, accessibility, and usability of the museums' collections information. She is enthusiastic about disseminating the results of the latest research and putting theory to practice. Maija joined ICOM and CIDOC in 1996 and has served in the Boards of ICOM Finland and CIDOC. Since early 2016, she has been co-Chairing CIDOC’s Documentation Standards WG.

Rupert Shepherd The National Gallery, London, UK
Short Bio:

Rupert Shepherd initially trained as an art historian, specialising in the Italian Renaissance, before moving into museum documentation, dabbling in humanities computing and digitisation along the way. Having managed the Ashmolean Museum’s documentation for three years, and the Horniman Museum and Gardens' for six, he has been Collection Information Manager at the National Gallery, London, since 2016